Searching for Bobby Fischer (7 page)

Alburt’s conversational style is at the same time eloquent and understated. While he talks he occasionally puts his hand on your shoulder or arm in the manner of a reassuring older relative. When he senses that his remarks have caused surprise, he lifts an eyebrow, then continues in a quiet melodious voice. “In the Soviet Union I was often asked to draw games in important international tournaments, and even famous players such as Tal and Bronstein
were occasionally asked to lose games. When they organize a tournament in the Soviet Union, they have a plan. If they want to make a new grandmaster, they will tell the stronger players that they must lose to him. Occasionally you can refuse, but it depends on who’s asking. If it’s someone important, you can be punished severely and lose your source of income. Being asked to draw and lose games is so natural on the lowest level that when you play in an international tournament and an official says, ‘You must lose; the prestige of the Soviet Union is at stake,’ you have already learned to obey. To refuse would be a hard crime against the state.”

For the past several months, the upcoming championship match in Moscow had dominated the daily conversation of chess players in New York City, but when the subject was raised with Alburt, he seemed sad and slightly bored. “Today Kasparov would be the favorite,” he said, “but changes could take place in the highest reaches of the Soviet government that would make the match a fiction. For years, Karpov had a benefactor in the government. Through his connection with this man, Karpov gained more political power and material privileges than any other Soviet chess player in history. Then, during the time of the Korchnoi match, he became a favorite of Brezhnev. But after Brezhnev’s death, Andropov removed Karpov’s patron from his high government position and sent him to Hungary on the pretext that he was a homosexual. This weakened Karpov’s position, even though he was still world champion.

“At about the same time, Andropov brought in a man named Aliev, who rapidly became one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. He was Kasparov’s benefactor, and Kasparov became as powerful as Karpov—maybe even more so. Now, with Andropov’s death and Chernenko’s coming to power, nobody knows what will happen. Kasparov, who is half-Jewish and, half-Armenian, is not the ideal Soviet hero. If Aliev were to lose his job in the Politburo before September tenth, I would bet ten to one that Kasparov will lose the match.”

THIS CYNICAL VIEW
of the Soviet chess establishment was titillating but hard to believe. It sounded more like a description of a covert CIA operation than like my kid’s favorite game. Vitaly Zaltzman,
Igor Ivanov, Lev Alburt and Victor Korchnoi all told the same extravagant story: “Karpov would have Kasparov poisoned if he could get away with it.” “Watch to see if Kasparov becomes ill.” “Karpov will use germ warfare. They’ll do anything.” “When Russian chess players travel abroad they carry out espionage assignments.” “They play by their own rules.” “Chess is entirely political in the Soviet Union.” But was it true? Many American chess players, like Joel Benjamin, whom Alburt admires, dismissed his observations and those of other Russian defectors as influenced by political bias and personal bitterness. “I always take Lev with a grain of salt,” Benjamin said.

Traveling to Moscow to watch the world championship and perhaps to track down Boris Gulko and other dissidents, using watches and pornographic books as bait, had seemed like a great adventure before we left New York. But now, flying through the night with my seven-year-old son asleep on Pandolfini’s shoulder while I read David Shipler’s accounts of KGB agents setting up journalists, our plans seemed naïve, even stupid. I’d been warned not to bring books critical of the Soviet Union into the country and so I decided to leave Shipler’s book in Helsinki, although it seemed like a sneaky way to begin the trip.

Six hours later, as the plane approached Finland, Bruce and Josh were playing chess. “Josh, you’ve hung your knight. You’re not concentrating,” Bruce said with an edge of impatience as I tried to doze. “Why aren’t you looking at the board, Tiger?” Joshua’s bad moves felt like little stings.

THE TERMINAL IN
Helsinki was cheerful and attractive. In front of the duty-free shops little boys wearing penny loafers skated across slick floors, and fashionable ladies in high heels clicked past carrying clear plastic bags crammed with reindeer skins, vodka and mohair shawls. There were elegant well-lighted delis with hams, fat sausages and smoked fish, and a kiosk where boys ogled toy trucks and Eastern European men furtively glanced through girlie magazines selling for four times their price in the States. I considered buying a few magazines for the KGB grandmaster who might lead us to Boris Gulko but decided not to.

As we walked toward Immigration at a distant end of the airport,
Bruce and I joked about crossing the Iron Curtain, but we were both a little nervous. Apparently all those years of bad television movies in which the good guys got shot down a few feet from freedom had left a mark. “What’s the Iron Curtain?” Josh asked.

“Shh.”

“Is it tall? Will we see it from the plane?”

“Shh.”

At the far end of the airport the terminal was quiet. While we sat waiting for our flight to Moscow, Josh played with his miniature racing cars, and his little imitations of their sounds seemed brassy and inappropriate. I turned to Bruce to whisper something, then stopped myself. Josh began to tell a joke and Bruce barked at him, “No more, Josh, not until we get there.” Like everyone else at this end of the terminal, we were uneasy and humorless.

*
New York: Times Books, 1983.

7

THE HALL OF COLUMNS

T
he world championship stirred the passion and patriotic pride of millions of Soviet chess players and fans. Throughout September 3, the first day of the match, there were television programs and updates about it. Taxi drivers in austere black Volgas waiting outside our hotel and old ladies sweeping majestic subways with Mother Hubbard brooms talked about Karpov and Kasparov.

Early in the morning, Pandolfini, Josh and I took a taxi from the Cosmos Hotel to the Central Chess Club to pick up our press credentials. Behind heavy, ornate wooden doors we climbed wide staircases flanked by rows of austere portraits of great Russian players. This sprawling building had the worn, formal look of a state assembly that had seen better days. The rugs were colorless and the furniture was old and musty. There were scores of dusty offices devoted to chess management, but it was impossible to guess exactly what happened in them. Many of the offices were empty; others were occupied by a few men who seemed to sit idly at desks or to look out windows. In the halls were chess tables but no pieces were set up. We had expected rooms with rows of chess players such as we would find at the Manhattan Chess Club. Although Josh was exhausted by jet lag, he was looking forward to his first game in Russia, but in this whole large building not a single game was in progress.

A GROUP OF
fifty or sixty journalists waited on line in the hall outside one of the offices to get their press passes. Everyone was
caught up in the excitement of the match, which was being touted in chess circles as one of the greatest of the century. But some writers were apprehensive; stories were circulating that the Russians were being difficult about allowing newsmen into the Hall of Columns. Someone said that Harold Schonberg and Robert Byrne from the
New York Times
hadn’t come because they had been denied visas (eventually Schonberg did arrive). A Russian chess writer came out of the room livid; for some reason he had been refused credentials. “What am I to do?” he asked us in English. “I’m suppose to write about the match but I can’t get in.”

One European journalist, who was also an international chess master, came out of the room wearing his plastic press identification and recognized Bruce from the photograph above his column in
Chess Life
. He introduced himself and said that he looked forward to playing chess with Bruce in the evenings after the championship match had adjourned for the day. Pandolfini nodded and smiled thinly.

By the time it was our turn we had been standing on line for an hour and a half and Josh was asleep in a chair. I guided him into an office where several men sat behind a long table. Josh opened his eyes and whimpered that he was thirsty. At the far end of the room there was a Polaroid camera mounted on a pedestal. The first sophisticated piece of equipment we had seen in the Soviet Union was American-made.

Pandolfini and I pronounced our names, and a man who spoke no English thumbed through a list. After a few minutes he smiled and shook his head; we were not on the list. He shrugged and gestured for the next man to enter. I tried to explain that we were journalists and that we had written ahead for press credentials, but again he pointed to the list and invited me to look. It was a simple problem: we were not on the list and would not be able to attend the match.

Next on line was a tall, dashingly handsome middle-aged man from Yugoslavia, Dimitrije Bjelica, who I later learned is a television celebrity and the most widely read chess journalist in Eastern Europe. He was on the list, and the Russians treated him like Karpov. Bjelica began handing out copies of his newest book to
the men working in the office. Feeling helpless and foolish, I pulled a letter of reference from my passport case and said, “Random House. Big book publisher.” I gestured widely with my arms, picked up a bulging folder from a desk, trying to demonstrate that I had come to write a book. Again the bureaucrat pointed to the list of names and shook his head.

Bjelica was the last of the journalists waiting for credentials. Posing for his Polaroid snapshot, he looked suntanned and ecstatic, like a movie star with the cameras rolling. Soon the photographer was taking the camera off its tripod. The Russian office workers were winding down from their morning’s work, joking and chatting with Bjelica, who titillated them with tidbits about Fischer, whom he had known since Bobby was a teenager. “Maybe Thursday you will be on the list,” the photographer said to us in broken English and raised an eyebrow. Bjelica reached into his briefcase for his new book on Bobby, including previously unpublished speed games, and the Russians ogled it as if it were a girlie magazine.

We were confused about what to do next. Joshua’s eyes were smeared with sleep, and he was impatient to leave. “When are we going to the circus? You promised, Daddy.” Disgusted, I asked one of the journalists on his way out where people buy tickets to the match. “There are no tickets,” the man said, “not unless you know someone in the Politburo.”

“Bruce Pandolfini. Bruce Pandolfini.” It was Dimitrije Bjelica, a torrent of glamor and good will. “I read your column in
Chess Life
. It is very good,” he said, smiling radiantly through his Black Sea tan. “Don’t worry, you will get your credentials. Believe me.” Bjelica offered to try to help us buy tickets that afternoon at the Hall of Columns. Then he said, “We will play some blitz, yes? I’m a FIDE master
*
and a very good speed player.” He added with a glint in his eye, “I’ve played hundreds of blitz games against Tal. I played him on the morning of the day he lost the world championship back to Botvinnik.”

Moscow seemed to be teeming with chess challenges for Bruce, who looked miserable about it. Apparently Eastern European chess masters were curious to see how the master from
Chess Life
played the game about which he had written hundreds of columns. But Pandolfini hadn’t played a tournament game in more than twelve years and rarely had time for casual games. He no longer considered himself a player, but it was a difficult point for him to explain.

At twenty-six, he had been among the fifty best chess players in the United States but recognized that he lacked the talent to become one of the fifty best in the world. A world-class player must have immense talent. It is like being an opera star: regardless of how hard you work, you must have the voice; there is no way around it. Pandolfini knew he would never be as good as the grandmasters whom he had admired as a boy, and he didn’t want to be a fringe player—a utility infielder, as it were, in the world of chess—so he stopped playing and devoted himself to teaching and writing. He is noncombative by nature, and a lover of the art of chess, and he had made a reasonable though often rocky life choice. But in fielding challenges within this dusty temple of chess, half a world away from the Manhattan Chess Club, the telephone, his students, his cramped little studio, his deadlines, his incomplete manuscripts, his beseeching and frustrated agent and editors, he was feeling counterfeit and trapped, like an aging gunfighter who has lost the speed of his draw.

From the Central Chess Club, we took a taxi to the House of Trade Unions, an eighteenth-century palace in which the championship would be determined. A huge banner advertising the match billowed across Marx Prospect, but for all of Moscow’s chess fever, the games were played in a hall that was at least one-third empty. Like the Bolshoi Ballet or the Obraztsov Puppet Theater, the match was nearly impossible for a citizen to get into unless he was a party official or a friend of someone important. A phalanx of police stood behind steel barricades on the far side of the avenue near Red Square and ordered thousands of chess fans to keep moving. Many stoically circled the block as if awaiting a sudden biblical cloudburst of tickets. People craned their necks toward the squat dull-green building, which was badly in need of a paint job,
and clumps of fans stopped and peered at posters featuring Karpov and Kasparov until the police prodded them on.

The splendor and excitement of the games seemed to catalyze the frustration and despair of many Russians. A Jewish chess master ahead of us in line talked about his problems. “I am a despised enemy in my own land,” he said. “I am not allowed to work. I’m not allowed to play in most chess tournaments, and for the others I don’t have the rubles to enter. I’m not allowed to leave for Israel. How am I to survive?” Bitterly he explained that Russians with a politically dissident point of view received a fast
nyet
at the Central Chess Club, where people stood on line each day pleading for tickets.